


Nor Stone, Nor Water, but Between

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Doxey Pool Legend
Genre: Other, PWP, Yuletide Treat, an inappropriate use for bones, mild bondage, threat of drowning, veiled references to suicide by drowning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 15:42:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16789879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: She feels its call in her heart. In her teeth. Reverberating against her eardrums. Something in her blood sings back out to it in joy and terror. Afraid to stay, afraid to run, she couldn’t move now if she wanted to.The water stirs, and up it comes, the thing that lives in Doxey Pool.





	Nor Stone, Nor Water, but Between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



**Nor Stone, Nor Water, but Between**

“The drop which hangs upon the pointed stone,  
Is that so to? it is or will be one.  
Took up between our fingers it is seen,  
To be nor stone, nor water, but between,”

– _De Mirabilibus Pecci_ , Thomas Hobbes

Is this what madness is? At the edge of Doxey Pool, and with her shoes and stockings damp with dew, Florence wonders. She feels it still, the sense that she is an interloper. It’s stronger now.

The last time she came here it was merely an itch, a whispering in the back of her skull. At least until she’d seen the ripples in the water, and thought, in the moment before a hand was pushed into hers, how it looked as if something were moving just beneath the surface.

“Are there snakes here?” she asked.

“Are you afraid of snakes?” The question was arch, and only slightly teasing.

She was. A little. Not much, even then, and she’s not frightened at all now. Not of serpents anyway. It seems silly to be frightened of snakes when she knows what else might dwell in Doxey Pool.

When the kiss came it was deceptively innocent. Close-mouthed and chaste, like they were school-girls again, and she knew that whatever it was she was waiting for, she’d have to wait a little longer. At least until after they’d swam.

 _Nothing_ , she thinks now. _There’s nothing there._ But her eyes are squeezed tight shut, so even if there was she wouldn’t know. It could be there now, rising smoothly and silently out of the pool. It might be towering over her, stooping towards her, that vast inhuman figure, reaching for her with bony hands.

But it can’t be, because she’d feel it. Even with her eyes squeezed tight shut, she’d know.

That isn’t the real reason she knows it isn’t there, of course. It’s not there because it doesn’t exist.

She opens her eyes.

There are no ripples in the water. There’s nothing here but Florence and the breeze still as a held breath. She’s cold enough to be shivering, her coat too thin, her cheeks are damp from the misty air. The surface is still and flat, the land around softly smudged charcoal. There’s a hazy misty quality to the air. If the water is a mirror, it reflects only the sky.

She kneels, studying the dark rocks that break the surface. The damp soaks her knees through her stockings, and she shivers as she edges to where the water meets the land. There’s nothing there, and she knows she should go home – there’s tea to be cooked, chores to do – but she’s pinned to the edge of that pool where something monstrous stirs, as though kept there against her will.

A story, her friend called it. A ghost story, and a fine one; enough to give her the shivers. As though she hadn’t been clinging as tightly to Florence as Florence was to her when that towering figure rose up. As though it wasn’t real. But if it wasn’t real, then why did she refuse to return here? Why did she pretend not to hear when Florence spoke of it, and only when Florence persisted did she wipe her floured hands on her apron and look up. Her expression was strange, almost haunted. The baby had started to cry.

“Come back there with me,” Florence said.

There was a bitter laugh. “You’re not serious.”

“If it wasn’t real, come back there with me. Where’s the harm?”

“’Where’s the _harm_?’”

“You said it yourself,” Florence said. “It wasn’t real. It was a ghost story.”

“I’m never going back there again.” And then she looked away, hugging herself. “Even stories can hurt.”

The world trembles. She feels it first as a barely perceptible shiver in the ground beneath her, and then strong enough that she digs her fingers into the earth to anchor herself. A series of ripples spreads out across the pool. That sense of trespass intensifies until she cannot bear it.

Something is coming.

When it comes, it comes not from the water, but from the earth. The land shifts and remakes itself, and the dark rocks that break the surface of the water lengthen like fingers, clawing up towards the sky. A hand emerges, water pooling in the hollow of the palm and spilling down the column of rock that serves for a wrist. Florence scrambles backwards through the mud as the hand reaches up towards the bone-white sky, then slams into the ground with a booming sound like thunder.

Inch by inch, the thing of dolomite and limestone drags itself out of the earth, a mountain growing before her eyes, showering her with mud and clumps of sod, until it crouches by the lake, so still it might have been a rock formation she never happened to notice before. It speaks, no words, only the grinding of stone on stone, the rustling of insects, the skittering of legs. Florence crouches on the ground now hummocked beneath her, like a cat perched on a blanket beneath which a person slumbers.

She feels its call in her heart. In her teeth. Reverberating against her eardrums. Something in her blood sings back out to it in joy and terror. Afraid to stay, afraid to run, she couldn’t move now if she wanted to.

The water stirs, and up it comes, the thing that lives in Doxey Pool.

The column of water rises, and with it comes a whispering sound like the rushing of a stream. The thing of earth and stone watches, and Florence can feel its hunger like a knot in her chest. It waits as the water-thing takes the shape, more or less, of a woman some thirty feet tall, its surface pitted with rocks and weed, with a faint briny scent like the sea.

An arm tears away from the torso with a shower of water, elongating and snaking downwards towards the boulder that seems to serve as the stone-thing’s head. The end of that snake of water flattens, the flotsam of the bottom of the pool refashioned into jointed fingers. The first finger is tipped with the ugly rusting blade of a sickle. It scrapes against the rock, and the sound sets her teeth on edge.

Florence cannot watch any more. She scrambles to her feet, and the water-thing’s head whips around. She whirls. From behind her comes the crash of falling water. She slips in the mud, and her knee strikes a stone. The pain is agonising.

As she tries to rise, weeping with terror, the ground twists beneath her, throwing her back to her knees. It falls away, parting like the Red Sea for Moses and sending her tumbling into the newly formed furrow. Earthworms writhe in the exposed mud. She hears the rushing sound of water, a two-foot high wall of water surging towards her. She chokes out a cry, claws her way up the bank, but she succeeds only in pulling wet mud down on herself as the freezing water surges around her legs. The ground gives another treacherous lurch beneath her feet, and she loses her balance. The water is shallow but the current is strong, sucking at her feet every time she tries to right herself. It draws her along the trough, pulling her inexorably towards the open pool.

It’s waiting there, the water-thing. She can see it, the top of its head breaking the water like a seal. It’s the size of an island.

“Please,” she begs. “Please.” And the current eases a little.

It doesn’t speak. Or not exactly. Like the stone-thing, it has no words, only a series of impressions and images that blur and tangle together as they flash through her head.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and cannot tear her eyes away from that sleek waiting head. Something snakes around her thigh, an eel, perhaps. Another around her wrist. “Oh God no please no please, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to see.”

Behind her the rumble of stone on rock and the water-thing’s head surfaces a little further. All around the circumference of its head a waterfall of droplets rattles down. There is something snakelike about the way it moves, something hypnotic. Her knee burns where it struck against the rock. Florence closes her eyes, aware that the current still has her in its grip. At the edge of the trough, the ground beneath her legs falls away, and she twists onto her belly, clawing at the silted earth to stop herself.

The head of the stone-thing blots out the sky, a faceless, featureless expanse of weathered stone, mottled with lichen. There is a crevice that might be a mouth, and terror streaks through her. She opens her mouth to scream and then the current sucks her underwater. The water is murky, but she can see overhead the faceless stone head looming closer. Bubbles erupt from her mouth in a gush of panicked breath, because she’s certain it’s going to come crashing down into the water and crush her. It stops just above the surface. Something vast cuts through the water around her as swiftly and surely as a shark.

Her muscles are starting to ache. No matter how hard she kicks, she can’t fight the current. Her lungs are screaming, the urge to take a breath pressing against her chest, and at the edge of her blackening vision, a voice around her and inside her, an echo that pulses with her blood, asks her _why_.

_I was curious. I wanted to see._

Around her the water goes still. Her scissoring legs propel her upwards so quickly she takes in a gulp of water, splutters as her head breaks the surface. She babbles her thanks at the sky, thinking for a moment that she must have lost her mind, that she waded out into the water fully dressed. She’s been seeing things in the dreamlike veil between life and death.

“Oh thank God,” she says, thinking herself saved, “thank God.”

It surfaces beside her, wet and shimmering in the strange misty light. A drifting mass of weed passes behind one glittering eye.

The water closes around her like a fist. The sickle-claw hooks around her chest, the blunt rusting edge leaving a trail of wet flakes of rust on her collarbone. Her blouse clings like a second skin as she’s lifted out of the water. Her legs dangle free, the water swirling around her waist, leaving her suspended in mid-air, disoriented by the unnatural weightlessness.

It brings her up to its face, regards her with its glittering eyes much as a child might study an unusual form of beetle. She stops fighting, squeezes her eyes shut, but being unable to see makes the knot of dread in her chest that much worse, so she opens her eyes a crack, half-hoping it will be gone. It isn’t.

And then she’s descending again. It sets her down on the surface, the sickle scraping against her skin as it releases her. She sinks, but only as deep as her knees. The strangely buoyant water is no longer cold, but blood-warm, although her clothes cling to her, wet and chill. She lifts her gaze, stares up at the retreating arm, following its movement as it returns and melds with the column of swirling water.

A mist has risen up, closing in so that Florence cannot see where the water ends and land begins. Against the mist, the water-thing is indistinct, seeming little more than a shimmering movement in the air as it sinks into the pool with an outwards-rippling ring of concentric circles and vanishes out of sight.

She hears stone scraping against stone, then something large comes crashing through the water. The stone giant emerges out of the mist, some twenty feet away.

Florence’s mouth drops open as she sees what has until this moment been concealed by its crouched posture – its phallus, perhaps some ten foot long, with a rough thickening at the head.

“Gosh,” she says faintly, and around her the water shivers with something that might have been laughter. Waves lap against Florence’s knees, but although the water is warm against her inner thighs, cold goosebumps ripple up her back.

The giant crashes to one knee. A wave of displaced water surges outwards. The faceless head shows no emotion, but there’s an urgency to its movements, slow and stately though they are. It scoops its arms into the water, and heaves, and up comes the creature that lives in Doxey Pool, a writhing snake of glistening water that envelopes the giant’s rutting lower half. Liquid it may be, but it seems to have substance enough to allow the giant to grasp it, to adjust its position, to enter it in a single thrust.

Whether it is lovemaking or violence, Florence cannot tell. The movements of the two giants are furious as they grapple with one another. Waves crash against the stone, sending up sprays of spume; they surge, withdraw, surge forth again.

With every thrust, a wave washes over her as high as her breasts, and there’s a constant rippling movement between her legs. It kindles a flame low down in Florence’s belly. At first she presses her thighs together, nervous of how the blood hot water seems to lap at her with intent, but gradually her will to fight is eroded and her legs ease open. A sweet aching sensation coils in the pit of her belly.

From out of the water an arm reaches towards her. The sickle blade scrapes down her cheek, her throat, tugs at the neckline of her blouse. For a moment she’s submerged, her whole body immersed, and then she’s in the air again, gasping, her clothes seeming cold and chill and confining. She wants suddenly to strip off, to plunge beneath the surface of the water, to swallow it down, to be filled with it and surrounded by it all at once.

The giant reaches its peak. A wave crashes over her, and when she looks back, she sees it vanishing back into the earth it came from. The hand of water catches her and steadies her, seeming to pulse around her with the same clutch and release as an aftershock of pleasure.

It returns her to the grassy bank, where she lies, panting, muscles aching. What would her friend say if she saw Florence like this, lying sprawled with her skirt rucked up around her thighs, her stockings torn quite beyond repair, her skin nubbled with goosebumps? The head emerges from the water. It watches her, eyes glittering, but whether with promise or threat Florence cannot say.

“Did that really just happen?” she asks.

Her answer comes in a series of flickering images of the water and the land at war. The scars in the landscape left by encroaching ice. Cliffs eroded by the lashing of the sea. Water carving out channels with constant attrition. Stalactites forming with the ceaseless drip of water.

 _Covenant_.

A wave laps along the bank like a tongue. It seems to ask a question.

Her heart skitters. She can see the truth in the depths of those black glittering eyes. To this thing Florence’s little soul is as meaningless as a mayfly’s. And still…

She leans back against the bank. Murmurs, “Yes,” in a faint little voice, and thinks this must be madness. She’s still thinking it as she edges forward, the mud soaking through her stockings, creeping like wet little fingers into her underwear. She slips her feet into the water, up to her ankles, up to her calves. She stops there and rolls her ruined stockings down one by one, throwing them aside. The sickle descends, scraps past her cheek, and Florence goes still.

Its fingers have been formed from rib bones.

She feels a quiver of fear as the sickle tugs at the neckline of her blouse, the other fingers – the _bones_ – brushing her cheek.

She exhales. Begins to unfasten the buttons of her blouse, feeling suddenly shy, like a nervous bride on her wedding night.

“Where’s the harm?” she says, and laughs aloud, peeling the sodden cotton away from her skin. She throws it away from the water, up the bank, hoping she can find it later. God knows what people will think if they see her returning home soaked to the skin and covered in mud.

Her bun comes loose, a couple of kirby grips falling free as her hair tumbles over her shoulders. She unhooks her brassiere, and tosses that up the bank as well.

And then she lowers herself into the pool, the water welcoming, her hair drifting free. She floats, only her face breaking the water. It makes her think of holidays in Scarborough, plunging into water so cold she’d swear it could almost stop the heart. The waves surging up around her ankles, the white foam and froth like reaching fingers. The salt-brine taste on her lips. The sensations afterwards, lying in bed, the echo memory of the waves making her body rise and fall.

The current catches at her, tugging her this way and that, and she wriggles to push her skirt down over her hips.

Drifting clumps of reed twist around her ankles like tendrils, and pebbles caught in the current abrade her nipples, bringing them to aching little points. The mingled sensations startle her, and her grip on her skirt slips. She gasps, half-laughing, and makes a snatch for it. It’s going to be awkward making her way home as it is, but it’ll be far worse if she loses her skirt.

 _Assuming you ever make it home_ , she thinks.

That stills her for a moment. She feels a grave jolt of gravity, a spark of something that might be fear. Then the palpitating sensation at her sex snatches it away, and she surfaces, flinging the skirt in what she judges must be the direction of the bank.

It’s further away than she realised.

The current is getting stronger. Now there is a constant pummelling pressure between her legs. She feels herself melting with pleasure and desire, her senses reeling as the ends of the water-thing’s rib-bone fingers comb through her hair.

Something brushes against her arm, soft and questing. It’s waterweed, she realises, twining like a snake around her wrists.

She feels it again, that stirring in her mind that she chooses to interpret as a question. In fact, she’s not certain it’s any such thing, but the alternative is so frightening she does not want to explore it. Let it be a question then, and there can be only one answer.

“Yes,” she whispers, “Oh God, yes.”

The weeds tighten, pulling her wrists together behind her back. Her breasts arch out, the water swirling around them in a gentle caressing pressure, but it’s not enough. The palpitations of the water between her legs have stopped, leaving her empty and aching. Nor is she prepared for the terrifying sensation of having her hands bound while in the water. It holds her buoyant, but if the water-thing loses interest in her once it’s assuaged its curiosity, what then? Will it let her sink?

She tugs at her bonds, hearing the surging pulse of her blood in her ears, and feels them give. With time she’ll be able to work her way free, so long as she still has the strength in her body to tread water until she frees her arms enough to swim. Assuming the water-thing lets her.

The sickle scrapes against her scalp, and down between her breasts, not hard enough to break the skin, but enough, perhaps, to leave a mark. It moves over her belly, and then down further. It hooks at the waistband of her underwear, too blunt to cut the cotton, tugging them down, over her thighs, her knees, her ankles, until she’s naked, stripped of her clothes and utterly helpless.

Florence waits. Nothing comes.

She floats at an angle, her face just above the surface, her body stretching down into the depths. By now, surely someone will be wondering where she’s got to. The sky is deepening violet, with the hazy light of the dying day at the horizon. It’s said the pool is bottomless. The water is so dark she can well believe that’s true, that she could swim deeper and deeper and never hit the bottom. God only knows what else is lurking in the depths.

The water is still and flat around her, only the strange unnatural current beneath the surface keeping her face afloat. She kicks her legs, whispers, “Please,” up at the indigo sky.

It comes as a questing ripple of water, like bubbles popping on her inner thighs. As close as she is, she cries out, arching her hips towards the unfamiliar sensation, which is nothing like fingers or a tongue. Water is ceaseless and implacable; it works its way into every nook and crevice.

It begins, the rippling palpitation against her sex, gentle at first, like a pattering of raindrops, and then grows stronger, almost painful, until she’s torn between spreading her legs wider to seek more contact, or pressing them together. Not that she could: the current is too strong and will not let her. She’s helpless.

The rest of the pool is flat and smooth as glass, but here around her the water is choppy with white-capped waves. The flotsam and jetsam of the bottom of the pool swirls around her. Branches, pebbles, the brief yellow gleam of ancient gold. Something larger bumps up over her belly and breasts, and surfaces in the water before her face. A human skull, yellowed and splintered, with dark staring sockets. Bubbles surge up from her submerged mouth, and she struggles, kicking away, arching back to push her chin above the water so she can cry out in shock.

Something hard presses between her legs. It’s nothing like a human shaft, with its thin cushioning of silken skin. There’s no give to the thing that probes inside her.

Something that was once a rib and is now a finger. She can feel the others, pressing like calipers into the meat of her thighs.

She shudders, struggling against the tight bonds of water-weeds that hold her wrists and ankles fast, but the water is still swirling against her, and horrified as she is, the pleasure is all-encompassing. Every inch of her body is lost to sensation, the water licking at her. She arches back, crying out at the sky. Between her legs, the rib-bone twists to and fro, grinding against the walls of her sex while the water ripples over her clitoris.

The twin sensations are too much, and she comes hard, gasping in wordless pleasure, her sex clutching in tight little spasms.

The water-thing releases her. Still panting from the ecstasy of her release, she plunges without warning beneath the surface.

Bubbles escape her mouth as her weakened legs thrash out, kicking her to the surface. Her head breaks the surface, The water is no longer blood-warm but almost freezing, the chill biting to the bone. She shivers, her teeth chattering uncontrollably, but between her legs there’s a lingering heat, the muscles still pulsing. She tears at the waterweed, and breaks for shore.

It seems to take an age, but finally her bare feet touch the bottom and she’s wading forwards, clawing herself, trembling and shaking, onto the bank. She sprawls on the damp grass, weeping with relief. It’s drizzling with rain. If she stays here much longer she risks exposure – and in more ways than one – but somehow she doesn’t care.

A dream, she thinks. She’d gone swimming or fallen in, and almost drowned. And in that moment, caught between life and death, she’d dreamed.

 _But it happened,_ she thinks, _it happened_. She can still feel the sensation of the water, the memory replicated in the core of every single cell. Her sex still pulses with the afterglow of pleasure.

 _The stone giant_. It must have changed the lay of the land around the pool. But when she sits up, wrapping her arms around her chest to cover her breasts, the land remains unchanged.

She stands, shaky as a new born colt, and casts around for her discarded clothes, trying to piece together the story she’s going to tell. She’ll think of something: she’s good with stories. Part of her is thinking her friend was right, that she never should have come back to this half-haunted place and she never will again. But while she can tell stories well enough, she’s not much of a liar, and she’s lying now.

Her gaze drifts back to the water, and perhaps it’s her imagination, or perhaps it’s something about the way the light falls upon the water, but it seems as if something has broken the surface. The moonlight glimmers on a wet rippling mound, on watching eyes that glitter with something that could be either threat or promise. And then it’s gone, melting away as if it had never been there, and Florence turns for home.


End file.
